The present disclosure relates to integrated circuits and, more particularly, to an apparatus and method for measuring the jitter of an integrated circuit.
Conventionally, jitter is measured by bringing the signals to be measured off of the chip. On-chip methods have been proposed, but generally suffered from calibration delays, extended measurement times and/or the presence of noise sources during measurement.
Accordingly, what is needed is a new on-chip jitter measurement circuit to enable measurement of jitter at multiple internal nodes without the need to bring the signals to be measured off the chip. It is desirable that the new on-chip jitter measurement circuit be self-calibrating, and compare favorably to other proposed methods in terms of smaller size, reduced measurement time, and elimination of noise sources during measurement.